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It’s a hundred and sixteen years since the turn of the nineteenth century, and in that time only eight entities have aspired to the title of Champion Breeder in South Africa, which makes it the tightest-held premiership in all of racing. That Summerhill should’ve arrived at its tenth title in twelve years through a new earnings record with hardly a “Big Five” sire in sight, tell us that besides luck, there must’ve been other factors at work. We can only marvel at the efforts of our people, the generosity of the land, and the contribution of the “boys” in the stallion barn.

As a lawyer in his younger days, breeder Mick Goss will be familiar with the Latin phrase, “annus horribilis.” The words (“horrible year”) were famously used by Queen Elizabeth in a speech at the Guildhall in 1992, but fast forward 24 years and they certainly apply to the Summerhill Stud supremo.

SOUTH AFRICAN HORSERACING SEASON

2012/13

Mike Moon

Mike Moon

The TimesWe won’t be hearing strangled renderings of Auld Lang Syne echoing through the racing barns of the land, but the year has indeed run its course, a new one has begun, and celebratory thrashes are being enjoyed.

We’re talking, of course, about the changing of the racing year on August 1 - the start of the 2013/14 season.

It’s often said that racing exists in a world of its own, and there’s truth in that. It’s a magnificent obsession for many protagonists, consuming their lives and leaving them with little time to reflect on that other tedious stuff that makes up the world around them.

Having their own year, at 180 degrees from everyone else’s, rather confirms this idea of a bunch apart. Not that racing folk are unfriendly. Oh no. But they’ve got so much to do to get those darn horses running for them that they can seem a little distracted.

Take the racehorse trainer, for example, who works longer, harder hours than most people in other jobs (certainly journalism).

He’s up in the small hours for morning gallops; then supervises feeding, grooming, medical attention, farriery, mucking-out, lunging, afternoon walking, admin, bedding, feeding again, more nursing, blanketing and even a soothing good night word for the valuable resident of each box to waft the dopey critter off to sleep.

Many other players, even punters, are also absorbed in their herculean, time-consuming tasks of making a living from a frantic, fragile, frustrating business. Some find great success and become champions - and they’re the ones partying right now and who will receive Equus Awards anon.

Another icon of present day racing, Piere Strydom, was a runaway winner of the jockey championship - a title he dominated in the 1990s but hasn’t pursued in recent years. “Striker” notched up 210 winners, 51 more than the incumbent, Anton Marcus - who was troubled by injury.

EQUUS AWARDS

Theatre of Marcellus, Emperors Palace

14 August 2013

The 2013 Equus Awards were celebrated in a fine spirit of camaraderie Wednesday evening at a fitting banquet in the magnificent Theatre of Marcellus, Emperors Palace. The industry paid tribute to its Champions and top local and international achievers.

Summerhill is extremely proud to have been awarded the coveted Equus Champion Breeder Award and we congratulate our fellow Champions in their respective categories.

SOUTH AFRICAN BREEDERS’ CHAMPIONSHIP

Season 2012/13

mick goss

Mick Goss

Summerhill CEOWe finally did it. We don’t know what the margin is, but judging from the sms’ and emails, the telephone calls and the television announcements, there are enough people out there who do know, and they’ve been generous in their praise. These are humbling moments, because they remind us of the millions of hours our people put into delivering them, and of the courage and talents of our horses in claiming victory. In its present form, Summerhill is thirty-four years old, and it took 25 of those to produce the first championship, historic for the fact that it was the first time in the game’s annals that the pendulum had swung East. That it’s remained here for the past 9 years is a tribute to guts, determination and a work ethic that goes way beyond the call of duty. I have to confess, as thrilling as it always is to know that you’re part of a championship, it’s an even greater satisfaction to know that for the next year, you can look forward to the sunrise knowing that you’re going to work with one of the world’s great teams, and that you’re getting to work with the Lord’s greatest creation.

The daunting thing though, now the job is done, is that this very day, your tally winds back to zero, and the whole thing kicks off again. There’s no respite, the competition is keen, they’re resourceful and just as determined, and the numbers (and the odds) are overwhelming. You’d think that keeping a team like ours interested after nine years at the top and keeping them motivated would be something of a challenge, but these guys know that the first thing they have to do, is to keep their feet on the ground. Horseracing is an unforgiving business, one moment you’re cruising, the next you’re bruising, and there’s little time for the fallen. It prefers to hail its survivors, and the best thing to do at times like this, is to remember your heroes: Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Gary Player, Jan Smuts, the Dalai Lama and Vincent O’Brien and you quickly get sense of perspective. So as soon as the back-slapping is over, it’s back to the grindstone. The horses don’t know yet that we’ve won the championship, and they need to be fed.

One of the first calls we received last evening, came from this farm’s fine friend, the King of Lesotho: that His Majesty should have the time and the inclination to remember these things in a frenetic schedule, is the best proof of the value of relationships and the beguiling impact that horses have on the human spirit. Another call came from a fellow champion, our once-again crowned leading trainer, Mike de Kock and his wife Diane, whose margin of victory over a dogged foe, Sean Tarry, was about as tight as ours was over Klawervlei. De Kock was garnering his eighth trainer’s title, but as we like to remind him, we reached that milestone a while back!

SOUTH AFRICAN BREEDERS’ PREMIERSHIP

Season 2012/13

mick goss

Mick Goss

Summerhill CEOWhen I was growing up, convention decreed that when under pressure, you kept it to yourself, you internalised your thoughts and you worked it out. Being stoic about your struggles was the gentlemanly thing to do well into the late decades of the last century. Then suddenly doctors of the mind began to tell us that we should share our issues, that we should unburden ourselves of the weight on our shoulders.

These days, it’s as though the world has turned a complete circle. People want to know how you feel, they want you to share your innermost thoughts, and so that’s what we’re going to do right now. In case you thought we were suffering some serious psychological disorder, be at peace. South Africa’s is about the most tightly-held Breeders’ Premiership on the planet, one which, since the beginning of recording, has been held by just six entities, and to the best of our knowledge in the pre-recording era, just one or two others have aspired to the mountaintop.

Ours though is unique for a couple of other reasons, the first of which is our locality. Since the breeding of racehorses first kicked off in the Western Cape several centuries ago, no farm on this side of the Drakensberg had ever been there until we won our first title in the 2004/2005 season. We’d been close before, agonisingly so the previous year, but winning it was a milestone not only for Summerhill, but for the fabric of racehorse production across the country. At last it put to rest the widely-held theory that you couldn’t breed a decent horse in these parts, and we have to concede, it took more than a year or two for us to believe it was true, and that is was repeatable.

The second unique feature of this championship, is that no farm has held it for eight consecutive years since the seemingly “interminable” reign of the famous Birch Brothers in the early 1980s. The title had resided with them ever since recordings began in 1947, and it was uninterrupted for 36 years. We can’t see a repeat of that in the modern era, given the depth, the power and the excellence of the opposition these days. Historically, the breeding of racehorses was the preserve of farmers, stockmen who lived on their farms, and raised horses as part of a mixed enterprise. They did so with limited means, and those that knew their stock best and applied the smartest of intuitions, climbed the mountain. These days, the world of racehorse breeding in South Africa is entirely different. It is dominated by big money and big business, people with the means to buy virtually what they want in the way of genetics, to acquire the best of land and to employ the best of management. The kind of people who used to own the farms in those days are now running them, and they have at their disposal the personnel, the equipment and all the trappings of big enterprise, at their disposal.

Summerhill stands on its own in the top half dozen studs in the land as a pure farming entity, funded through the endeavours of its people alone, and carried along by the achievements of the horses it raises. Few properties of Summerhill’s ilk finance themselves on the quality of their horsemen. These people know what they owe, and they understand the responsibility of living in the shadow of Giant’s Castle. If it does nothing else, Summerhill is a beacon for those who would want the world to be a better place, and who have hopes of one day repeating the feat.

We used the word “eight” advisedly at the beginning of this story, because it isn’t “nine” yet. Technically, it’s still possible for our pursuers to get their hands on the pot of gold, but with a lead of marginally more than R300,000 this morning, and just two days to go, we’d rather be sitting in our seat than anyone else’s. It’s been a close run thing, and it’s been a clean-run thing, and for that we must thank our competitors. It’s a compliment to them and their efforts, that we’ll have to hold our cheers until midnight on Wednesday, lest we should “lose our ventures”.

Editor’s note: Business Manager Ferdi Heinen, last evening, put together a projection of what principal rivals, Klawervlei, will need to do today and tomorrow to wrest the title from us with their engaged runners. The exercise assumes Summerhill will have no earnings in that time.

SOUTH AFRICAN BREEDER’S CHAMPIONSHIP

Season 2012/13

The most frequently asked question of the Summerhill team at the moment, is how we’re feeling about the Breeder’s Championship. I guess we’d be less than frank if we didn’t admit to a little apprehension! Though the degree of our anxiety depends on whose records you are consulting, the Sporting Post or Tellytrack? According to the former, going into the weekend, Summerhill held an advantage of R333,357, while Alistair Cohen’s revelation on Tellytrack on Saturday, suggested that our margin over Klawervlei was just about identical to the gap between Mike de Kock and Sean Tarry in the trainer’s log. Somewhere in the “one-hundred-and-ninety-thousands”.

Both championships will go to the line, and the forthcoming weekend’s Gold Cup meeting will probably be decisive. Problem is, while de Kock and Tarry have their destinies in their own hands and are both amply loaded for their encounter, any student of form worth his salt, will tell you that the dice are stacked in Klawervlei’s favour for the Breeder’s Premiership. Besides, they have one other distinct advantage, and that rests in the fact that at least two of their principals, Markus Jooste and Chris van Niekerk, are among the country’s biggest owners and have been piling up their Klawervlei-bred entries at the races for a couple of weeks now, with an armada of runners. All season, we’ve been saying the numbers have become overwhelming, and it’s only because Summerhill-breds run more often than most other farm’s products, that we’ve been able to maintain a semblance of relevance.

We’re sure we don’t have to persuade any of our readers that we are not defeatists at Summerhill. On the face of it though, the Klawervlei hand is particularly strong. As the only Group One winner in the Gold Bracelet, Thunder Dance is unbeatable in theory; on the strength of her victory in the Golden Slipper (Gr.1) on July Day, For The Lads looks to be exactly that, insurmountable on form; and on the back of his runaway march in the Gold Vase, Kolkata is a massive runner in the Gold Cup (Gr.1). Add to these the presence of Desert Sheik in the top division Handicap, and the signs could be ominous fairly early in the proceedings. That said, for eight consecutive years, the products of this farm have demonstrated that they will not go down without a battle, and there’ll be more on that as the week goes on.

Let’s not underestimate it though; the Breeder’s Championship means an awful lot in the life of any farm, as it defines all the things you stand for. The South African version is the tightest held premiership in international breeding, with only seven entities having aspired to the mountain-top in well over a century. The yardstick by which we are all measured, is the incredible story of the Birch Brothers, who from the time formal recording was commenced in 1948, remained unbeaten for a period of 36 years, a history unlikely to be surpassed given that the competition these days is significantly sterner, and the money invested at unprecedented levels. That in itself puts our own eight consecutive championships into a more recent perspective. No farm since 1984, has strung together that many in a row, and if it never happens again for us, we’ll rest in the knowledge that we gave it our best shot!

Meanwhile, you can be assured that the Summerhill team long ago identified other markers by which it wants to be measured: nobody owns a monopoly on a championship. Our people know the equations others often forget; great harvests come from arid sources. A modern-day record in Breeder’s Premierships, the winners of four Durban Julys, three J&B Mets, three Summer Handicaps, and they all sprung from nowhere. The other thing that drives this team, is knowing that one day you are going to be beaten: it’s the best way to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose; you are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

SOUTH AFRICAN HORSERACING

Season 2011/2012

If you’ve been reading these columns, you already know the bursting pride with which Summerhill is celebrating its eighth consecutive Breeder’s Championship. This is a country with a rich tradition in horsemanship, and we are surrounded in the racing game with professionals whose talents match those of others across the world. We’ve often pointed to the achievements of our trainers in the international realm, and the fact that one of the most sought-after jockey’s titles, (Hong Kong), has been in South African hands for 19 of the past 20 years. It follows then, that back at home, you can expect matching achievements among those who ply their trade in South Africa, and there are several.

Jet Master made it six Sires’ premierships, with five Group One winners - quite astounding! In any normal year, horses like Silvano and Var, who chalked up the most stakes winners with two champions respectively, would’ve been standouts; but they were relatively pale by comparison with Jet Master, who should finally be recognised as “the greatest stallion of all time”. We need to recall here that he was a R15,000 weanling, that there were no stakes winners in his first four dams (the family resided here, so we know it intimately), and that he has made it in the most competitive stallion environment in our history.

“It’s a great tribute to a fine stock-raising environment, a great climate and one of the best teams in the world. Racing in South Africa is as competitive as it comes, and you have to give your A-game every time your horses step onto a racecourse, because there are thousands of spectators out there commentating”, said an obviously delighted Mick Goss, CEO of Summerhill.

Nicci Garner writes that Irish Flame was a revelation during the 2009-10 racing season. He started his career with Dean Kannemeyer in the Cape and won three of his first four starts, including the Politician Stakes.

After running a disappointing race behind Bravura in the Investec Cape Derby, original owner Percy von Molendorff sold a majority share in him to Larry Nestadt, Bernard Kantor and Gary Barber and he was transferred to the Highveld yard of champion trainer Mike de Kock in March.

Irish Flame then proceeded to set the world alight and some two months after his arrival in Johannesburg landed his first Grade 1 win when trouncing Triple Crown contender Pierre Jourdan in the SA Derby. He went on to win both the Grade 1 Daily News 2000 and Gold Circle Derby (Grade 2).

Little wonder then, that the Equus Awards panel not only voted him “Horse of the Year” but his owners received two other awards for their star runner - Champion Three-Year-Old Colt / Gelding and Champion Stayer.

THE EQUUS AWARDS

12 August 2010

The Equus Awards will for the first time be sponsored by Racing South Africa, the company established to represent the major stakeholders of South African horseracing and breeding; namely the breeders, operators and owners.

This black tie event will honour last season’s Champions and will be staged at the Emperors Palace Centre Court in Johannesburg on Thursday, 12 August 2010.

The format for this year’s Equus Awards takes on a very different feel with presentations being conducted in a cinematic environment with the opulent Banquet following and the coveted “Horse Of The Year” award to be announced at the end of dinner by Racing South Africa Chairman, Mr Vidrik Thurling.

Longstanding Chairman of the organizing committee, Mr Larry Wainstein, is confident guests will enjoy the changes and all is set for an evening of great celebration!

“LITTLE NOTICE FOR A BIG ACHIEVEMENT”

The least heralded of last week’s National Championships was that of theleading Broodmare Sire for the past season, yet in Northern Guest’s eighth consecutive title, he went where no other South African Broodmare Sire has been, and he needs only one more championship to equal the world record held by Mr. Prospector in the United States.

Many chapters have been written about his influence on this farm and its affairs, not the least of which that his daughters have been major contributors to everything we’ve achieved here, including our fifth championship. That no other person or entity has ever won five consecutive Equus Awards in a single category says enough about that achievement, but it wouldn’t have happened were it not for the contributions of Northern Guest’s daughters.

That said, we should remember at times like this that he altered the commercial landscape in the stallion services trade, almost single-handedly redefining the territory and reshaping the terms of business, as well as the number of mares a stallion could handle in a season, forever.

Long before he became a national treasure, the news broke that his two world class Champion brothers, Try My Best and El Gran Senor, were both seriously low on fertility, and we still recall the day that Michael Watt, the then chairman of Britain’s greatest auction house, Tattersalls, wired us with the news and reminded us of the value of the asset we were sitting on.

By then, Northern Guest’s first foals were on the ground, and while we hardly needed the reminder, this was a welcome reinforcement of the belief that perhaps, very early in our lives at Summerhill, we’d gotten “lucky”. For all his influence as a pre-eminent sire of champion juveniles in his later life, his first crop were slow to register their merit, and by the time he’d come to his fourth season, he was all but written off. And then they came, Senor Santa, Northern Princess, Rip Curl, Gun Drift, Mystery Guest, Gentleman Jones, Royal Thunder, Picture Search, Another Minstrel, _ _ bang, bang,one after another. And he’d hardly begun to register the Classic horses that were to follow.

It was to be his distinction in the end that he should sire no fewer than six Grade One or Classic winning fillies (a portent of what was to become of them in the broodmare department, we guess,) and besides the later likes of Dance Every Dance, Golden Apple and Imperious Sue, who together with Angus made up (a pair ofJ&B Met winners, the one enduring memory which stands out, was the last great match race in South African history.

One New Years Day, 1989, his November Handicap (Gr.1) winning daughter, Northern Princess got up in the dying strides to deny the perennial Champion Sprinter, Senor Santa for the biggest match prize in history. The “grudge” behind the race was the elimination of “The Senor” from South Africa’s richest mile event on the grounds of his brilliance as a sprinter and the unlikely fact he would stay the mile, yet all the race did was to prove once and for all, that the mile was well within his compass, a point he made so emphatically in the First National Bank Stakes (Gr.1) a year later over the gruelling 1600m at Turffontein.

Not only did Northern Guest provide this farm with the profile all emerging operations would dream of, but such was the demand to visit his court, they came from every corner of the Southern African continent, and around us sprang up any number of new boarding farms, several of which are part of the enduring fabric of KwaZulu-Natal today. It’s arguable that Northern Guest did more for the creation of employment in this part of the thoroughbred world in his era than any collection of human beings did, and it’s a fact that there’s little on this farm today that was erected in his time, that he didn’t contribute to in one way or another.

The fact is, for as long as there are races to be run and victories to be won, in our lifetime at least, his name will live on in the best pedigrees of the day.

As it was in those days when he passed the Farm office on his way to his paddock at the end of the driveway, with his characteristic limp garnered in his younger days on Vincent O’Brien’s Ballydoyle gallops, the farm management are standing in salute. Our hats are off!

It is so that Summerhill and its many clients have just garnered their fifth consecutive National Breeder’s title. It is also an irrefutable fact that we did so by almost doubling the earnings of our nearest pursuer, excellent producers of racehorses in their own right. It’s not our practice, as those who know us well will attest, to gloat over these things, and we prefer to be gracious in victory, just as we’ve always been in defeat. However, from the time we displayed our effectiveness at this business, there’ve been those that would put us down, and who, despite the repeat of our latest championship, are unable to accept the merit of it. They persist with the belief that numbers, and numbers alone, have made it possible. It’s time for a response:

There’s an old saying (the Afrikaans version of the “tall poppy” syndrome) that “die hoogste boom vang die meeste wind”, and for our foreign visitors, that means “the tallest tree catches the most wind”. That goes with the territory, and we accept it as our lot; that’s why you so seldom see any attempt at self-justification in these columns. Yet that doesn’t mean we should simply lie down and die. Our fans deserve to know the facts.

Ever since the origin of racing’s championships, numbers have mattered, and if you look at the history of South African breeding, and those who’ve dominated, you’ll find it has been no different. The Birch Bros, one of the six entities to have held the title in all its history, are reputed to have won something approaching sixty times, yet their earnings (which is the basis for calculating the champion stud) were the sum of the contributions of three different families who traded under the name of Birch Brothers. The renowned Koster Bros earned their championships the same way, with contributions from the stock raised by several families. That shouldn’t detract from the undeniable truth that they bred a damn good horse, and plenty of them. We are a single entity, for what it’s worth, which had the necessity (and the enterprise, if we may say so,) to draw a broader church into our activities.

Ominously for Summerhill, this season Klawervlei Stud are anticipating the arrival of the order of 240 foals, all of which will be registered as Klawerveli breds, almost double the number we’re anticipating foaling in the name of Summerhill. These, in the end, are overwhelming numbers, and how else could you meet that challenge, but through doing your level best and perhaps doing things differently, as we always have, and to a degree, by having the numbers. At last week’s gala function, in a magnanimous address as recipient of the Owner of The Year award, Klawervlei’s “senior partner”, Markus Jooste gave notice that they had their sights firmly on Summerhill’s title!.

What our detractors overlook is that, despite the export of the five top runnersfrom this farm at the end of last season, we managed to achieve our Championship with earnings per runner not far short of R60 000, a figure which would’ve been significantly enhanced had the exports been retained on South African soil, contesting our best races. We speak of course, of the outstanding international performers of the past season, Imbongi, Art Of War, Paris Perfect, as well as Galant Gagnant and Desert Links, whose absence affected either our numbers or those of their sires (or both), to a marked degree. Two of them were not officially bred by Summerhill, but we’re proud to say they were graduates of our paddocks, and together with the Group One winning filly, Outcome (similarly bred here, but not under our banner), they signalled to the world the ongoing quality emerging from Summerhill. That we achieved this result with the “second” string, makes this year’s title all the more satisfying.

Equally, in a recent observation on soundness, Robin Bruss pointed to the fact that Summerhill has the highest number of starts per horse in training, it’s worth adding that in recent seasons, we’ve been represented by the nation’s leading seven and eight year olds; Nhlavini(who holds the record of six consecutive appearances as a finalist at the Equus Awards), Red Carpet Style and Brigadier Parker, all of whom were Stakes winners in their dotage years. And right now, in fact this last weekend, Hear The Drums endorsed the durability of our graduates with his 26th victory, making him the winning-most racehorse in South Africa in the past thirty years.

It’s easy to point fingers, but there are other means of achieving their own satisfaction for our critics, and that is to get on and make their own mark through the establishment of their own standards of excellence. That way, they’ll earn their personal fulfilment, and have less to worry about in the success of others. Just last month, Fortune magazine carried the stories of the twenty most successful Americans of the past few decades, and the best advice they had received. While we’ll provide a little more in time in the way of insights from these icons, it’s worth noting that Bill Gates emphasized the value of fanaticism (saying that it was underrated as a force in success), and that both he and Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, were fanatical about certain things; Colin Powell speculated on the value of a work ethic, and what it took to become a successful general, and in the context of this article, perhaps the most sage advice came from Scott Boras.

Boras is one of the most successful managers of sportsmen and celebrities of all time, and he related a story of the advice he received from his counsellor following victory in a court case at an early stage in his career.

“You will find,” opined the counsellor, “that if you are especially effective at what you do, 95% of what is said about you will be negative”. We didn’t realise that things were that tough in our game, but if those that swipe at our championship are anywhere near those odds, we take it as a compliment.